This site, The Home of Jon, is built on the most-excellent Wordpress blogging engine. I made the switch from CodeIgniter not very long ago, because it just made more sense for me to use a Content Management System, as opposed to working on my own custom rolled website. For my art site I used a plugin called “Yet Another PhotoBlog“, or YAPB for short. I seriously love this plugin – it does just what I need it to do. Plus it’s author Johannes Jarolim coded it very nicely.
I ran into one problem though using it when I was creating my art site. I had a bunch of pictures, and though Wordpress has an import function, it doesn’t support YAPB natively. That was a big problem for me – I could import all my posts, but then I’d have to go back and manually add pictures to each of my posts (around 100 of them). Um, I don’t think so.
So I set my mind to it – I was going to write myself a Wordpress plugin to make it much easier for me to be lazy! So it was written. So let it be done.
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“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t allow you to do that”. That chilling statement made by the machine HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey is just one of the many examples of how humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence. I myself am very interested in the subject and hope to go back to graduate school for a degree in the field. In the meantime I’m writing small applications like these to demonstrate what AI can do.
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Training in the remotest parts of the galaxy, TicTacToeTron (also known as T4 for those who are down) has relentlessly sought the highest point of perfection in the mind-bending process that some call the game “Tic-Tac-Toe”. Read more »
This is a an applet that implements a well-known Artificial Intelligence algorithm called A* search. The ‘robot’ is set up in a maze-like structure and must find its way to the goal. The robot has complete knowledge of the environment – meaning that it knows where the goal is and where the walls are. Read more »
The Peg Board solver is a depth-first-search algorithm that will iterate through each potential configuration of the peg board that is possible – it will then store each solution that it finds. Since there are no loops in the search space, this method is complete and when the search is done all possible solutions to the game will have been found. See this link for a more in-depth explanation of the Peg Board game and its solutions.
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So I was writing an implementation of the A* search algorithm for a friend. He has a robot that must navigate a maze – the robot can obtain “complete” knowledge of its environment through an instrument called “ladar”. It uses lasers to map out the area around it. Thus, knowing the goal and the obstacles around it, the A* search algorithm proved to be a prime solution for automatically navigating the robot. Read more »
